Love Your Neighbor as Yourself, Part 2

But when the Pharisees heard that He had put the
Sadducees to silence, they gathered themselves together. And one of
them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, "Teacher, which
is the greatest commandment in the Law?" And He said to him, "'You
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your
soul, and with all your mind.' This is the great and foremost
commandment. The second is like it, 'You shall love your neighbor
as yourself.' On these two commandments depend the whole Law and
the Prophets."

A Very Radical Command

"Love your neighbor as yourself" is a very radical command.
What I mean by "radical" is this: it cuts to the root of
our sinfulness and exposes it and, by God's grace, severs it. The
root of our sinfulness is the desire for our own happiness
apart from God and apart from the happiness of others
in God. Let me say it again: the root of our sinfulness is the
desire to be happy apart from God and apart from the
happiness of others in God. All sin comes from a desire to be
happy cut off from glory of God and cut off from the good of others.
The command of Jesus cuts to this root, exposes it, and severs
it.

Another name for this root of sinfulness is pride.
Pride is the presumption that we can be happy without depending on
God as the source of our happiness and without caring if others
find their happiness in God. Pride is the passion to be happy
contaminated and corrupted by two things: 1) the unwillingness to
see God as the only fountain of true and lasting joy, and 2) the
unwillingness to see other people as designed by God to receive our
joy in him. If you take the desire to be happy and strip away from
it God as the fountain of your happiness, and people as the
recipients of your happiness, what you have left is the engine of
pride. Pride is the pursuit of happiness anywhere but in the glory
of God and the good of other people. This is the root of all
sin.

Now Jesus says, "Love your neighbor as yourself." And with that
commandment he cuts to the root of our sinfulness. How so?

Self-Love: A Creation of God

Jesus says in effect: I start with your inborn, deep, defining
human trait—your love for yourself. This is a given. I don't
command it; I assume it. All of you have a powerful instinct of
self-preservation and self-fulfillment. You all want to be happy.
You all want to live and to live with satisfaction. You want food
for yourself. You want clothes for yourself. You want a place to
live for yourself. You want protection from violence against
yourself. You want meaningful or pleasant activity to fill your
days. You want some friends to like you and spend some time with
you. You want your life to count in some way. All this is
self-love. Self-love is the deep longing to diminish pain and to
increase happiness. That's what Jesus starts with when he says, "as
yourself."

Everyone, without exception, has this human trait. This is what
moves us to do this or that. Even suicide is pursued out of this
principle of self-love. In the midst of a feeling of utter
meaningless and hopelessness and numbness of depression the soul
says: "It can't get any worse than this. So even if I don't know
what I will gain through death, I do know what I will escape." And
so suicide is an attempt to escape the intolerable. It is an act of
self-love.

Now Jesus says, I start with this self-love. This is what I know
about you. This is common to all people. You don't have to learn
it. It comes with your humanity. My Father created it. In and of
itself it is good. To hunger for food is not evil. To want to be
warm in the winter is not evil. To want to be safe in a crisis is
not evil. To want to be healthy during a plague is not evil. To
want to be liked by others is not evil. To want your life to count
in some significant way is not evil. This was a defining human
trait before the fall of man into sin, and it is not evil in
itself.

Love Your Neighbor AS You Love Yourself

Whether it has become evil in your life will be exposed as you
hear and respond to Jesus' commandment. He commands, "As you love
yourself, so love your neighbor." Which means: As you long for food
when you are hungry, so long to feed your neighbor when he is
hungry. As you long for nice clothes for yourself, so long for nice
clothes for your neighbor. As you work for a comfortable place to
live, so desire a comfortable place to live for your neighbor. As
you seek to be safe and secure from calamity and violence, so seek
comfort and security for your neighbor. As you seek friends for
yourself, so be a friend to your neighbor. As you want your life to
count and be significant, so desire that same significance for your
neighbor. As you work to make good grades yourself, so work to help
your neighbor make good grades. As you like to be welcomed into
strange company, so welcome your neighbor into strange company. As
you would that men would do to you, do so to them.

In other words make your self-seeking the measure of
your self-giving. When Jesus says, "Love your neighbor as
yourself," the word "as" is very radical: "Love your neighbor
as yourself." That's a BIG word: "As!" It means: If you
are energetic in pursing your own happiness, be energetic
in pursuing the happiness of your neighbor. If you are
creative in pursuing your own happiness, be creative in
pursuing the happiness of your neighbor. If you are
persevering in pursuing your own happiness, be persevering
in pursuing the happiness of your neighbor. In other words, Jesus
is not just saying: seek for your neighbor the same things
you seek for yourself, but also seek them in the same
way—the same zeal and energy and creativity and
perseverance. The same life and death commitment when you are in
danger. Make your own self-seeking the measure of your
self-giving. Measure your pursuit of the happiness of others, and
what it should be, by the pursuit of your own. How do you pursue
your own well-being? Pursue your neighbor's well-being that way
too.

Now this is very threatening and almost overwhelming. Because we
feel immediately that if we take Jesus seriously, we will not just
have to love others "as we love ourselves," but we will have to
love them "instead of loving ourselves." That's what it
seems like. We fear that if we follow Jesus in this, and really
devote ourselves to pursuing the happiness of others, then our own
desire for happiness will always be preempted. The neighbor's claim
on my time and energy and creativity will always take priority. So
the command to love my neighbor as I love myself really feels like
a threat to my own self-love. How is this even possible? If there
is born in us a natural desire for our own happiness, and if this
is not in itself evil, but good, how can we give it up and begin
only to seek the happiness of others at the expense of our own?

The Necessity of the First Commandment to Fulfill the
Second

I think that is exactly the threat that Jesus wants us to feel,
until we realize that this—exactly this—is why the
first commandment is the first commandment. It's the first
commandment that makes the second commandment doable and takes away
the threat that the second commandment is really the suicide of our
own happiness. The first commandment is, "Love the Lord your God
with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind"
(v. 37). The first commandment is the basis of the second
commandment. The second commandment is a visible expression of the
first commandment. Which means this: Before you make your own self-
seeking the measure of your self-giving, make God the focus of your
self-seeking. This is the point of the first commandment.

"Love God with all your heart" means: Find in God a satisfaction
so profound that it fills up all your heart. "Love God with all
your soul" means: Find in God a meaning so rich and so deep that it
fills up all the aching corners of your soul. "Love God with all
your mind" means: Find in God the riches of knowledge and insight
and wisdom that guide and satisfy all that the human mind was meant
to be.

In other words take all your self-love—all your longing
for joy and hope and love and security and fulfillment and
significance—take all that, and focus it on God, until he
satisfies your heart and soul and mind. What you will find is that
this is not a canceling out of self-love. This is a fulfillment and
transformation of self-love. Self-love is the desire for life and
satisfaction rather than frustration and death. God says, Come to
me, and I will give you fullness of joy. I will satisfy your heart
and soul and mind with my glory. This is the first and great
commandment.

And with that great discovery—that God is the never-ending
fountain of our joy—the way we love others is forever
changed. Now when Jesus says, "Love your neighbor as
yourself," we don't respond by saying, "Oh, this is
threatening. This means my love for myself is made impossible by
all the claims
of my neighbor. I could never do this." Instead we
say, "Oh, yes, I love myself. I have longings for joy and
satisfaction and fulfillment and significance and security. But God
has called me—indeed he has commanded me—to come to him
first for all these things. He commands that my love for him be the
form of my love for me. That all my longings for me I find in him.
That is what my self-love is now. It is my love for God. They have
become one. My quest for happiness is now nothing other than a
quest for God. And he has been found in Jesus Christ."

What Jesus Is Commanding

So what, then, is Jesus commanding in the second
commandment—that we love our neighbor as ourselves? He is
commanding that our self- love, which has now discovered its
fulfillment in God-love, be the measure and the content of our
neighbor-love. Or, to put it another way, he is commanding that our
inborn self-seeking, which has now been transposed into
God-seeking, overflow and extend itself to our neighbor. So, for
example:

If you are longing to see more of God's bounty and liberality
through the supply of food and rent and clothing, then seek to show
others the greatness of this divine bounty by the generosity you
have found in him. Let the fulfillment of your own self-love in
God-love overflow into neighbor love. Or better: seek that God, who
is the fulfillment of your self-love overflow through your
neighbor-love and become the fulfillment of your neighbor's
self-love.

If you want to enjoy more of God's compassion through the
consolations he gives you in sorrow, then seek to show others more
of God's compassion through the consolations you extend to them in
sorrow.

If you long to savor more of God's wisdom through the counsel he
gives in stressful relationships, then seek to extend more of God's
wisdom to others in their stressful relationships.

If you delight in seeing God's goodness in relaxed times of
leisure, then extend that goodness to others by helping them have
relaxed, healthy times of leisure.

If you want to see more of God's saving grace powerfully
manifested in your life, then stretch out that grace into the lives
of others who need that saving grace.

If you want to enjoy more of the riches of God's personal
friendship through thick and thin, then extend that friendship to
the lonely through thick and thin.

In all these ways neighbor-love does not threaten self-love
because self-love has become God-love, and God-love is not
threatened, diminished, or exhausted by being poured into the lives
of others.

I don't mean that this answers all our questions about love, or
that it takes away every kind of threat in loving our neighbor.
There are many perplexities in the life of love. There are
competing claims on our limited time. There are hard choices about
what to give up and what to keep. There are different
interpretations of what is good for another person. I don't mean
here that all of that becomes simple.

What I do mean is this: loving God sustains us through all the
joy and pain and perplexity and uncertainty of what loving our
neighbor should be. When the sacrifice is great, we remember that
his grace is sufficient. When the fork in the road of love is
unmarked, we remember with joy and love that his grace is
sufficient. When we are distracted by the world and our hearts give
way temporarily to selfishness and we are off the path, we remember
that God alone can satisfy, and we repent and love his
all-sufficient grace all the more.

Summary

It is a very radical command. It cuts to the root of sin, called
pride. Remember, this root of pride that gives rise to all other
sins, is the passion to be happy (self-love) contaminated and
corrupted by two things: 1) the unwillingness to see God as the
only fountain of true and lasting joy, and 2) the unwillingness to
see other people as designed by God to receive our joy in him. But
that is exactly the contamination and corruption of self-love that
Jesus counteracts in these two commandments. In the first
commandment he focuses the passion to be happy firmly on God and
God alone. In the second commandment he opens a whole world of
expanding joy in God and says: people, human beings, everywhere you
find them, are designed to receive and enlarge your joy in God.
Love them the way you love yourself. Show them, give
them—through every practical means available—what you
have found for yourself in God.

John Piper (@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books.

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